The Debated Mind

The Debated Mind PDF Author: Harvey Whitehouse
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000180867
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
In a further development of the nature-nurture debate, this collection of articles questions how the human mind influences the content and organization of culture. In the study of mental activity, can the effects of evolution and history be teased apart? Evolutionary psychologists argue that cultural transmission is constrained by our genetic inheritance. Few social and cultural anthropologists have found this argument to be relevant to their work and many would doubt its validity. This book uniquely pitches the arguments for innatism against ethnographic perspectives that call into question the theoretical foundations of orthodox evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Ultimately the aim of the debate is to create an original set of mutually compatible theories that will open up new areas for interdisciplinary research.

The Debated Mind

The Debated Mind PDF Author: Harvey Whitehouse
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000180867
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book

Book Description
In a further development of the nature-nurture debate, this collection of articles questions how the human mind influences the content and organization of culture. In the study of mental activity, can the effects of evolution and history be teased apart? Evolutionary psychologists argue that cultural transmission is constrained by our genetic inheritance. Few social and cultural anthropologists have found this argument to be relevant to their work and many would doubt its validity. This book uniquely pitches the arguments for innatism against ethnographic perspectives that call into question the theoretical foundations of orthodox evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Ultimately the aim of the debate is to create an original set of mutually compatible theories that will open up new areas for interdisciplinary research.

The Debated Mind

The Debated Mind PDF Author: Harvey Whitehouse
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000184048
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In a further development of the nature-nurture debate, this collection of articles questions how the human mind influences the content and organization of culture. In the study of mental activity, can the effects of evolution and history be teased apart? Evolutionary psychologists argue that cultural transmission is constrained by our genetic inheritance. Few social and cultural anthropologists have found this argument to be relevant to their work and many would doubt its validity. This book uniquely pitches the arguments for innatism against ethnographic perspectives that call into question the theoretical foundations of orthodox evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Ultimately the aim of the debate is to create an original set of mutually compatible theories that will open up new areas for interdisciplinary research.

Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind

Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind PDF Author: Brian P. McLaughlin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470766328
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind showcases the leading contributors to the field, debating the major questions in philosophy of mind today. Comprises 20 newly commissioned essays on hotly debated issues in the philosophy of mind Written by a cast of leading experts in their fields, essays take opposing views on 10 central contemporary debates A thorough introduction provides a comprehensive background to the issues explored Organized into three sections which explore the ontology of the mental, nature of the mental content, and the nature of consciousness

Mindreading Animals

Mindreading Animals PDF Author: Robert W. Lurz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262016052
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Animals live in a world of other minds, human and nonhuman, and their well-being and survival often depends on what is going on in the minds of these other creatures. But do animals know that other creatures have minds? And how would we know if they do? In Mindreading Animals, Robert Lurz offers a fresh approach to the hotly debated question of mental-state attribution in nonhuman animals. Some empirical researchers and philosophers claim that some animals are capable of anticipating other creatures' behaviors by interpreting observable cues as signs of underlying mental states; others claim that animals are merely clever behavior-readers, capable of using such cues to anticipate others' behaviors without interpreting them as evidence of underlying mental states. Lurz argues that neither position is compelling and proposes a way to move the debate, and the field, forward. Lurz offers a bottom-up model of mental-state attribution that is built on cognitive abilities that animals are known to possess rather than on a preconceived view of the mind applicable to mindreading abilities in humans. Lurz goes on to describe an innovative series of new experimental protocols for animal mindreading research that show in detail how various types of animals -- from apes to monkeys to ravens to dogs -- can be tested for perceptual state and belief attribution.

Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-world

Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-world PDF Author: Joseph K. Schear
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 041548586X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
The 14 specially commissioned chapters in this superb collection enrich McDowell and Dreyfus's debate over perceptual experience, rationality, reflectiveness, and perception. Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate should be considered essential reading for both students and scholars of analytic philosophy and phenomenology.

The Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind PDF Author: Greg Lukianoff
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224919
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction • A New York Times Notable Book • Bloomberg Best Book of 2018 “Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf . . . Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities.” —Jonathan Marks, Commentary “The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

The Great Brain Debate

The Great Brain Debate PDF Author: John E. Dowling
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400841380
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Whether our personality, intelligence, and behavior are more likely to be shaped by our environment or our genetic coding is not simply an idle question for today's researchers. There are tremendous consequences to understanding the crucial role that environment and genes each play. How we raise and educate our children, how we treat various mental diseases or conditions, how we care for our elderly--these are just some of the issues that can be informed by a better understanding of brain development. In The Great Brain Debate, the eminent neuroscience researcher John Dowling looks at these and other important issues. The work that is being done on the connection between the brain and vision, as well as the ways in which our brains help us learn new languages, are particularly revealing. From this groundbreaking new research, Dowling explains startling new insights into how the brain functions and how it can (or cannot) be molded and changed. By studying the brain across the spectrum of our lives, from infancy through adulthood and into old age, Dowling shows the ways in which both nature and nurture play key roles over the course of a human lifetime.

On Our Minds

On Our Minds PDF Author: Eric M. Gander
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801881382
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
There is no question more fundamental to human existence than that posed by the nature-versus-nurture debate. For much of the past century, it was widely believed that there was no essential human nature and that people could be educated or socialized to thrive in almost any imaginable culture. Today, that orthodoxy is being directly and forcefully challenged by a new science of the mind: evolutionary psychology. Like the theory of evolution itself, the implications of evolutionary psychology are provocative and unsettling. Rather than viewing the human mind as a mysterious black box or a blank slate, evolutionary psychologists see it as a physical organ that has evolved to process certain types of information in certain ways that enables us to thrive only in certain types of cultures. In On Our Minds, Eric M. Gander examines all sides of the public debate between evolutionary psychologists and their critics. Paying particularly close attention to the popular science writings of Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, Gander traces the history of the controversy, succinctly summarizes the claims and theories of the evolutionary psychologists, dissects the various arguments deployed by each side, and considers in detail the far-reaching ramifications—social, cultural, and political—of this debate. Gander's lucid and highly readable account concludes that evolutionary psychology now holds the potential to answer our oldest and most profound moral and philosophical questions, fundamentally changing our self–perception as a species.

The Creationist Debate, Second Edition

The Creationist Debate, Second Edition PDF Author: Arthur McCalla
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623561108
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Whereas scholarly study of Creationism usually places it in the context of religion and the history or philosophy of science, The Creationist Debate, here revised and completely updated in its second edition, has been written in the conviction that creationism is ultimately about the status of the Bible in the modern world. Creationism as a modern ideology exists in order to defend the authority of the Bible as a repository of transhistorical truth from the challenges of any and all historical sciences. It belongs to and is inseparable from Protestant Fundamentalists' desire to resubject the modern world to the authority of the inerrant Bible. Intelligent Design creationism, to the extent that it distinguishes itself from reactionary biblicism, is a program advocating a supernaturalist, providentialist understanding of the world. Accordingly, The Creationist Debate situates Creationism and Intelligent Design in relation to the rise, from the early modern period onwards, of historical thinking in various scientific and scholarly disciplines (including theories of the earth, chronology, civil history, geology, biblical criticism, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology) in their complex relationship to the status of the Bible as an historical authority. It argues that the debate over Creationism is at bottom a debate over how to interpret the biblical text rather than over how to interpret the world.

Debates in Psychology

Debates in Psychology PDF Author: Andy Bell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134651392
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Presents and discusses theories and applications in psychology in a highly readable and accessible manner with each topic being illustrated through examples of actual psychological investigations.